only perhaps—­had Norman married Josephine Burroughs, he might have assented, after a fashion, to this idea of the relations of the man and the woman.  No doubt, had he remained under the spell of Dorothy’s mystery and beauty, he would have felt and acted the slave he had made of himself at the outset.  But in the circumstances he was looking at their prospective life together with sane eyes.  And so she had, in addition to all her other reasons for heartache, a sense that she, the goddess-queen, the American woman, with the birthright of dominion over the male, was being cheated, humbled, degraded.

At first he saw that this sense of being wronged made it impossible for her to do anything at all toward educating herself for her position.  But time brought about the change he had hoped for.  A few weeks, and she began to cheer up, almost in spite of herself.  What was the use in sulking or sighing or in self-pitying, when it brought only unhappiness to oneself?  The coarse and brutal male in the case was either unaware or indifferent.  There was no one and no place to fly to—­unless she wished to be much worse off than her darkest mood of self-pity represented her to her sorrowing self.  The housekeeper, Mrs. Lowell, was a “broken down gentlewoman” who had been chastened by misfortune into a wholesome state of practical good sense about the relative values of the real and the romantic.  Mrs. Lowell diagnosed the case of the young wife—­as Norman had shrewdly guessed she would—­and was soon adroitly showing her the many advantages of her lot.  Before they had been three months at Hempstead, Dorothy had discovered that she, in fact, was without a single ground for serious complaint.  She had a husband who was generous about money, and left her as absolutely alone as if he were mere occasional visitor at the house.  She had her living—­and such a living!—­she had plenty of interesting occupation—­she had not a single sordid care—­and perfect health.

The dreams, too—­It was curious about those dreams.  She would now have found it an intolerable bore to sit with hands idle in her lap and eyes upon vacancy, watching the dim, luminous shadows flit aimlessly by.  Yet that was the way she used to pass hours—­entire days.  She used to fight off sleep at night the longer to enjoy her one source of pure happiness.  There was no doubt about it, the fire of romance was burning low, and she was becoming commonplace, practical, resigned.  Well, why not?  Was not life over for her?—­that is, the life a girl’s fancy longs for.  In place of hope of romance, there was an uneasy feeling of a necessity of pleasing this husband of hers—­of making him comfortable.  What would befall her if she neglected trying to please him or if she, for all her trying, failed?  She did not look far in that direction.  Her uneasiness remained indefinite—­yet definite enough to keep her working from waking until bedtime.  And she dropped into the habit of watching his face with the same anxiety with which a farmer watches the weather.  When he happened one day to make a careless, absent-minded remark in disapproval of something in the domestic arrangements, she was thrown into such a nervous flutter that he observed it.